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It’s easy to see why content marketing is so appealing, as it essentially gives your company something to talk about.

Instead of firing off the same boring press release to whichever journalists will listen to and parrot its dry copy, providing an audience with quality content means providing them with something they can engage with, share and ultimately do your own marketing for you.

Although your audience is only going to do that if your content is entertaining, useful or innovative.

The State of Search Marketing Report 2013 looks in-depth at how companies are using various digital marketing channels, including paid search, search engine optimisation (natural search) and social media marketing.

It follows a survey of over 400 respondents from both companies (client-side advertisers) and agencies, collected in November 2013.

The findings cover the significance of different technologies and trends across paid search, SEO, social media, digital display, email and mobile marketing. The study also contains information on spending, resourcing and the untapped potential in digital marketing.

One of the questions asked is “to what degree are your search engine optimisation efforts integrated with the following digital marketing disciplines?”

Here are the company responses:

And here are the agency responses. As you can see the difference between companies and agencies in this case is fairly marginal.

The other interesting trend highlighted here is the significant move away from traditional display ad marketing.

Faith in traditional digital display advertising is fast decreasing, with many experts believing that banner ads just don’t work. As native advertising becomes an increasingly viable alternative, it’s clear in which area the bulk of marketing budgets will be spent.

Consumers are increasingly expecting a consistent experience across all channels and integrating the efforts of various digital marketing channels is a key part to delivering that experience.

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Companies’ content strategies are becoming ever more mature, according to research conducted for a new best practice guide.

Econsultancy’s new report into Digital Content Strategy highlights the growing importance of Content Strategy, not only as a capability within marketing organisations, but as an emerging discipline with its own associated specialist expertise.

You really don’t need me to tell you that there’s a LEGO movie out right now. It’s impossible to ignore.

Heck, even as I write this there’s a Culture Show special on BBC2 right now about how LEGO has influenced architecture. Funnily enough, when constructing our house, the builders ran out of red bricks halfway up and had to finish with yellows and greens.

Warner Bros. began the marketing push seven months ago in June 2013 with a rapturously received teaser trailer and continued with a solid social marketing strategy, which saw very close engagement on social channels that continues through to this week of release.

ITV even turned over an entire advert break during its Sunday night edition of Dancing on Ice to LEGO, during which adverts from BT, Confused.com and Premier Inn were remade with LEGO models.

The 2014 Super Bowl achieved a record breaking 111.5m viewers, making it the most watched event in USA history, just scraping past the 111.3m who watched the Super Bowl two years ago.

Of course the Super Bowl isn’t just about the football, it’s about the adverts. In fact much of what we read relating to the big game in the UK is mostly about the marketing: ‘it costs $4m per advertising slot’, ‘Scarlett Johansson and Soda Stream banned’, ‘David Beckham and H&M gamble with t-commerce’ and one story involving Coca-Cola that you can’t have failed to notice…

Coca-Cola’s unveiling of the controversial ‘Big Game’ commercial that carries the hashtag #AmericaIsBeautiful, in which the traditional American song ‘America the Beautiful’ is sung in nine different languages: English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, French and Arabic.

A predictable storm of protest followed from the Conservative quarters of the USA, with many right-wing pundits and politicians choosing to take the ad as a provocative blow to their ideals and all the things they perceive to be ‘American’.

Albeit one from the most famous, American corporation on the planet.

How has this controversy affected the brand? How does the advert itself stack up against the competition in terms of online sharing; a barometer of general opinion away from the political world?

Touchstorm has sent us over some data from its Super Bowl Video Scoreboard that tracks the #AmericaIsBeautiful controversy over YouTube, in terms of post-Super Bowl shares, comments and likes. But first, a little insight into the controversy…

Towards the end of last year, I started a series of posts digging into the mechanics of PPC agency pricing models.

The aim? To help buyers make more informed decisions when it comes to choosing a model that’s right for their business, whilst hopefully leading to some healthy debate amongst buyers and sellers alike.

If you haven’t already, check out the overview of percentage of spend and pay on performance models. And if you have, thank you for sticking with me. Here we go with the final post in the series, a look at fixed fee models.

There are numerous reports on the AI talent shortage. Some estimate that there are perhaps 300,000 AI experts worldwide but millions of open positions. Another report says the number of jobs requiring AI has increased by 450 % since 2013.

Transport app Citymapper is not the flashiest app out there. It’s not as well-known as Uber, or as widely-used as Google Maps. However, it’s certainly one that has served me well throughout 2018, and has cemented its long-term position on my home screen.